


soon you'll get better

by OverlyCheerfulRat



Category: Ghost Whisperer
Genre: Character Death, Character Study, Foster Care, Gen, Ghosts, Hospitals, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Terminal Illness, i just kind of went off
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:20:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25018420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OverlyCheerfulRat/pseuds/OverlyCheerfulRat
Summary: do you want to read a whole ass fanfiction based on a single episode of a tv show that was cancelled years ago? well today is your lucky day!
Kudos: 1





	soon you'll get better

Over thirteen years, Pete was placed with six different families. They all sent him back to the youth home within a month, always with the same complaint- "he's just too much for us to handle." Too loud, too energetic, too much trouble, too mouthy. The second family had hit him for that last one. By the time he turned eleven, he'd given up on ever being adopted, and he told himself he was fine with that. So nobody wanted him, so what? He had friends, and the people at the youth home liked him. That was enough.

He told himself that, but one day in Miss Shelly's office, when he'd just been sent back from another foster home, he blurted out, "Will you adopt me?" She stared at him, clearly a little confused, then smiled sadly.

"Oh... no, honey, I can't. It wouldn't be fair to the other kids here, you know that. We're gonna find you a home, though, don't worry," she promised. Pete slumped in his chair and said nothing. They both knew that each time he got sent back, it got harder to place him. His file had a laundry list of reasons to pick a different kid, a kid who hadn't been returned by everyone and their grandmother. Once, Pete broke into the filing cabinet and read it for himself, just to see what it said.

_Pete Murphy is an intelligent and extroverted child, however he has issues with authority and has been rehomed multiple times. Given up for adoption at birth. Gets along well with children his own age but is disrespectful and argumentative to adults. Extremely high energy. Suffers from nocturnal enuresis. Makes and keeps friends easily. Immediately defiant to foster parents, deliberately causes trouble._

He was five years old the first time he was sent to a foster home, and his new parents were a young couple who couldn't conceive on their own. They brought him back after a few weeks, wishing him luck but saying it just wasn't a good match. The second time, he was seven, and his foster parents hit him when he talked back. In the third home, only a few weeks later, he ran away after the foster father started coming into his bed at night. Miss Shelly was the only person who believed him. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth homes, his foster parents were well-meaning but all ultimately decided he was more trouble than he was worth.

So when he noticed the swelling in his neck, Pete was at the youth home. He ignored it at first, figuring it was nothing to worry about, until he started feeling nauseous and weak all the time. He lost weight and his hands shook. Black spots danced in his vision when he stood up, it was hard to breathe when he lay down, and the lump in his neck didn't go away. When he fainted in the hallway, they took him to the doctor, and several tests later he was told that he had Hodgkin's  
disease. "It's a type of lymphoma, but it's treatable," the doctor assured him. So Miss Shelly took him back to the youth home, promising that he'd be better soon.

"Soon" turned into two and a half months, at the end of which Pete couldn't keep any food down and passed out when he stood up for too long. He didn't want to be hospitalized, but they checked him into Rockland Memorial anyway, where the other pediatric patients had cards and teddy bears in their rooms. Pete had a jean jacket over his hospital gown, a passionate hatred for Nurse Goodman, and no visitors. He eventually stopped asking if Miss Shelly was coming. She was busy, he reminded himself. It wasn't like she could just ignore her job to go see one sick kid. Besides, he'd go back to the youth home when he got out.

Exactly two weeks and one day before he died, Pete realized he wasn't leaving the hospital. He demanded to talk to his doctor after several days of throwing up everything he ate or drank, at first just to complain that the feeding tube felt weird. "It's hard to talk, and why does it go through the nose anyway?"

"According to the nurses, you can still talk just fine," Dr. Martin said with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "It won't be for long, kiddo."

"When am I going home?" She didn't answer for a minute, and Pete looked down at himself. His hands were clutching weakly at the blankets, and he saw how bony they were. There was an IV in his arm and a heart monitor attached to the clamp on his index finger. If he stood up, he knew his legs would give out at once.

"We're not sure, Pete," Dr. Martin answered finally. "We'll all just have to wait and see." So Pete waited, and waited, and then he died in the middle of the night. No one was with him, not even a nurse, although they did run in when they heard the heart monitor flatline.

It only took a few seconds for him to realize he was dead- he saw his own body lying motionless in the hospital bed, looking very small, and then stepped back as the nurses came in. He wandered through the hospital for a few days, wondering if he had a funeral and if Miss Shelly went, until he stumbled across the abandoned polio ward. They liked him, and they listened to him, and he could protect them from the cold things. Pete was happier dead than alive.

For the first time, it was like having a family- Miss Shelly had been the closest he ever had to a mother, but she never came to visit him in the hospital. If he could see her again, he would have yelled at her, screamed that he was scared and alone and in pain and she left him. She left him alone in the hospital, with nurses who thought he was annoying and nothing to do all day. She's just like my real mother, he thought bitterly. 

It hurt more because Pete had loved her, and he thought she loved him too. Every time he was sent back to the youth home, Miss Shelly told him it wasn't his fault, said things had been getting too quiet anyway. When he got sick, she was the one who looked after him, even when it got worse and his hands shook too much to dress himself, when he couldn't walk without leaning against the wall. 

A few days before they decided to hospitalize him, Pete woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and vomited on himself, sobbing from the sharp pain in his neck. His roommate ran to get someone and returned with Miss Shelly, working late by coincidence, then awkwardly retreated to the day room. Miss Shelly carried him to the bathroom and set him in the shower, murmuring that everything would be fine soon. "We'll fix you up, okay? You're gonna be alright," she said quietly, helping him with the washcloth. 

The first few days at the hospital, he assumed they'd let him go soon. He hated being confined to bed- at least at the youth home, his friends would let him lean on them so he could go outside. The nurses were insistent that he had to rest, though, and they kept jabbing him with needles, so he quickly decided he would never talk to them if he didn't have to. 

The nurses weren't the worst part, though- it was feeling weak that he hated most. The first day, Pete got up to go to the bathroom, holding shakily to the bedrail, then promptly fell after a single step. He was set back in bed despite numerous loud protests, and a nurse sat with him to make sure he didn't get up again. He refused to ask for help going to the bathroom, so he just held it, figuring she'd leave soon. She didn't, and it wouldn't have mattered, because he wet himself after just a few minutes. Pete wouldn't look at her when she asked why he hadn't just told someone he had to go, and he struggled so much when she tried to clean him up that she threatened to sedate him. She must have told the doctor, because they put him back in diapers after that. It felt weird. 

He kept getting in trouble for trying to leave his room, even though he never got far. On more than once occasion they strapped him to the bed with leather restraints, which did nothing to stop him from loudly and continuously rambling about nothing to anyone who would listen. But after only a few weeks, the restraints became pretty pointless- he couldn't sit up on his own anymore, and he struggled to even roll over. He couldn't feed himself, so for about a week the nurses spoonfed him, but he threw up everything he ate. So they gave him a feeding tube, which he hated.

The last week was the worst. Pete woke up one morning choking on his own saliva, unable to swallow, and he never regained that ability. They had him lie on his side, and when they moved him he wanted to scream that they couldn't just rearrange him like he was a doll, but he couldn't talk. 

After he died, he talked to the doctors, even though they couldn't hear him. He told them that he would have gone into the stupid light if Miss Shelly had been with him, if he hadn't been so scared. "Nobody was ever there," he half-yelled to a nurse writing in someone's chart. "I was dying for months and nobody even came to see me!" She walked through him, and he ran away down the hall, and kept running through the hospital for hours.


End file.
